B U S I N E SS
The Missing Piece
OKC-based tech entrepreneur seeks to improve patient self-advocacy
D
ebi Willis is the founder and CEO of OKC-based PatientLink, a company that creates software solutions for the healthcare industry. Her background and life experiences have shaped her mission in life, which is to give a voice to patients and empower their advocacy of their own healthcare through technology. “That’s the path I’m on, just trying to weave the patient voice into healthcare,” shared Willis. One of her applications, MyLinks, allows patients to securely manage all of their medical records in one account that they control, free of charge. Patients can add to it, review it and share it with whomever they wish, regardless of which doctor they see. “If patients have access to their data, they can also understand their health better,” Willis explained. “Nobody is more interested in finding the answer than the person who has the illness or someone that loves them.” Willis and her team have won several awards for their MyLinks product. One, in particular, was especially rewarding, as it
54 July 2021
seemed impossible at the time. The government created a contest to see which company could make an application for patients. The competition was steep, against large tech companies on both coasts with a lot of financial backing. However, their small woman-owned company from Oklahoma beat all odds and won the contest. “That was a high point and propelled us to do even more. It was like winning the Triple Crown,” Willis shared. Willis was born into a family of scientists and entrepreneurs and developed a love for learning at a very young age. She believed that you could solve any problem if you could understand it. While taking a college test to help in determining her future occupation, she found errors within the test itself, which proved to be incredibly instrumental in the projection of her own life’s work. Her test results concluded that she should be one of three options: an astronaut, a ballerina or a computer programmer. She decided to become a computer programmer so that she could make a better test.
